The year opened with the Mother Tongues Festival with one of our staff Julie Ann organising a series of beautiful events highlighting diversity and commonality through language. Her input into the musical component showed us that there was a rich mine of talent we could harvest by offering Colourstrings in our native Irish. Julie Ann continues to teach the little ones each Sat in Irish and the children respond to her so beautifully. A must for anyone considering raising bi-lingual children.

In the summer we went to Dusseldorf for a week in the blistering heat. The music was probably the highest standard achieved to date by the school orchestra and over two concerts there the responses by German audiences was superb.

In the autumn we got to revisit an earlier education project we have embarked upon. We have devised a program of learning around the Carnival of the Animals that looked to integrate it into the mainstream school curriculum. There were tie-ins to Poetry and history as well as art, craft and zoology. This time instead of organising the music component as well we partnered with two other organisations. Music for Galway and Baboró International Arts Festival for Children. The result was a five week education package the lead up to a special series of performances with entirely new texts and dramatization. It sold out every performance in the festival.